Personal computers typically employ a metal chassis to support a number of components such as a power supply, a motherboard, several expansion boards, a hard disk drive, a floppy disk drive, and others. An ideal computer would run silently, generate little or no heat, and be highly resistant to physical shock. However, a conventional personal computer system generates noise and heat and can be severely damaged by sharply applied physical force. Two parts of a computer that generate vibration, noise, and heat arc the hard disk drive and the power supply. A hard disk drive has moving parts that necessarily generate vibration, noise, and heat. A power supply has an electrical transformer that generates heat, and therefore a power supply often is combined with a cooling fan. The cooling fan of the power supply creates vibration and noise.
A primary reason that a hard disk drive creates noise is that the movements of the parts of the hard drive cause vibrations which resonate in the computer chassis. The typical computer component is rigidly fixed to the computer chassis. A rigid connection efficiently transfers vibrations from a component such as a hard drive to the chassis. Therefore, in a conventional computer system a hard drive vibrates the chassis. The vibrating and resonating computer chassis thereby amplifies the noise generated by the hard drive. A typical computer fails to isolate the hard drive from rigid connection to the computer chassis and therefore falls to abate noise and vibration cause by the hard drive.
Similar to the vibration and noise transfer among components and the chassis described above, physical shock transferred among components and the chassis is problematic. Rigid connections do not allow for adequate shock isolation for components. That is, with a rigid connection, practically all of the force of a blow that is applied to a chassis is nearly instantaneously transfer red to a component connected to the chassis. What is needed is a resilient connection that allows for a delayed or dampened force transfer between the chassis and a component.
Another failing of a typical personal computer system is that the components within a chassis are not easily installed during manufacturing or easily accessible for maintenance purposes. A disadvantage of many personal computer chassises is that in order to access the components of the system, the computer chassis must be turned on its side, multiple fasteners must be removed, and the external connections to the computer may even need to be disconnected.
What is needed is a means for holding a computer component in a computer chassis that isolates vibrations of the component from the chassis and vice versa. As a result, noise transfer and physical shock transfer between the component and the chassis would be reduced. An improved system should also provide easy access to the component and be structured for adequate cooling of the component. In a system providing improved access, manufacturing and maintenance convenience would be increased and manufacturing and maintenance times would be reduced. The prior art has failed to provide a system that not only allows ready access to a component, but also dampens the noise from the component and the transfer of physical shock to the component, and provides for cooling of the component.